MANUFACTURING CENTRES UNREPRESENTED IN PARLIAMENT It was not so much that the landowning aristocracy were over-represented in Parliament by their control of so many pocket boroughs, as that great manufacturing centres were entirely unrepresented. The middle-class manufacturers had no means of making their influence felt in the unreformed House of Commons, for towns of such importance as Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham sent no representatives to Parliament. This meant that Parliament was out of touch with all the industrial life of the nation, and that nothing was done till after the Reform Act in the way of serious industrial legislation. 35 constituencies with hardly any voters at all returned 75 members 46 constituencies with less than 50 voters in each returned 90 " 19 constituencies with less than 100 voters in each returned 37 " 26 constituencies with less than 200 voters in each returned 52 " 84 male electors in other constituencies returned 157 " The Reform Act of 1832 changed all this. It disfranchised all boroughs with less than 2,000 inhabitants--fifty-six in all; allowed one member only to boroughs with between 2,000 and 4,000; gave representatives to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and to several other large manufacturing towns and London boroughs; extended the county franchise to leaseholders and L50 tenants at will; and settled the borough franchise on a uniform qualification of occupation in a house of L10 rateable value. It also fixed two days, instead of fifteen, as the limit for county elections, and one day for boroughs. THE PASSAGE OF THE GREAT REFORM BILL The Reform Bill was not carried without much rioting in the country, and some loss of life. The Duke of Wellington was at the head of the Tory Ministry in 1830; and though he declared in face of an Opposition that was headed by the Whig aristocrats, and included the middle-class manufacturers and the great bulk of the working class in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands, that "no better system (of Parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man" than the unreformed House of Commons, and that he would never bring forward a reform measure himself, and should always feel it his duty to resist such measure when proposed by others, yet, in less than two years after this speech Wellington's resistance had ended, and the Reform Bill was carried into law. What happened in those two years was this: At the general election in the summer of 1831, the popular cry was "the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill."